Brandy Dalton
Fallen Angel
Dark Entries
When Dark Entries started reissuing music from the late Patrick Cowley more than a decade ago, part of the appeal undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that some of the songs were originally created to soundtrack gay porn films. (A little novelty still goes a long way, even for hardcore music nerds.) Even so, anyone who picked up records like School Daze and Muscle Up quickly realized that their contents provided a window into the genius of an artist whose talents were largely relegated to society’s margins. Cowley may have worked with disco legend Sylvester, but back in the ‘70s and ’80s, he was also a working musician, and while scoring porn flicks may not have been prestigious at the time, it was a paying gig—and one that granted him a remarkable level of creative freedom.
The same could be said for the scores created by Brandy Dalton, who in the ’90s was tapped to soundtrack Fallen Angel, a trilogy of leather-oriented pornographic films. As part of Dark Entries’ ongoing mission of “shining light on a generation of composers and musicians lost to AIDS,” the label has compiled 16 of the late LA artist’s contributions to those movies on a new album, also titled Fallen Angel. Dalton had a background in EBM and industrial, and his work here does at times exude a similar sort of muscular rigidity, though it runs the gamut from woozy ambient textures to chuggy techno skronk. Even in its most intense moments, the music’s mechanical stomp and crunchy drum programming are often tempered by looming pools of smudgy static and mind-bending melodies, ultimately landing the record in an uncanny zone that’s somewhere in between British Murder Boys and the Twin Peaks soundtrack.